how to move images from aperture to lightroom?

[EricWHiss]

Hi,
I've been living a dual life - 80,000 images in an Aperture catalog and 30,000 in Lightroom.  I went to lightroom when Aperture would not work with my Leica DMR and now Phase P20 files and I am starting to like LR better especially now that they will have smart collections.  

But how do I get all my images with keywording and ratings from Aperture into Lightroom?  I tried a search both on the internet and here in the LL forums but didn't find anything.   Can anyone suggest a good workflow?

Thanks,
Eric

[john beardsworth]

Eric

The key is to use Aperture's export masters command, choosing the sidecar option which attaches xmp sidecar files which Lightroom can read. Test it out with a few files.

It will mean you need lots of disc space because export masters is duplicating your files - that's because Aperture doesn't have an option to save sidecars back to the original masters' folders. On the other hand, Aperture's export dialog does let you choose project or folder structure or dates.

There is another option but only if you have iView and your Aperture library is version 1-1.5, not 2. That's an Aperture plugin called Annoture which is designed to synchronize metadata between iView and Aperture. You'd run this - ie no need to export masters - and then use iView's Sync command to write the metadata into the image files. Not sure if Sync works with your exotic file formats, or if you'd want to do it anyway, but iView also has an extract metadata command which creates sidecars - sadly it's folder by folder.

I'm unsure if Aperture puts the ratings in the files, so you'd need to test with a few files - if not, copy the ratings in Aperture to the keywords and use them as the mechanism to transfer the ratings.

You also need a slightly different process if your originals are jpegs or tifs.

There are a small number of decent posts at Adobe's forum:

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.3c0599ef
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.3c059184
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc8bc2b/1

But try with a few and then ask again if things aren't clear.

John

[CatOne]

Using Export Masters and generating XMP sidecars will transfer keywords and ratings.

It will not transfer adjustments.

Note that Lightroom 2.0 supports smart collections, but I wouldn't advise putting all 110,000 files in the Lightroom 2 beta right now ;-)  You'll have to make due with standard collections for now for production use.

[john beardsworth]

Using Export Masters and generating XMP sidecars will transfer keywords and ratings.

It will not transfer adjustments.

Note that Lightroom 2.0 supports smart collections, but I wouldn't advise putting all 110,000 files in the Lightroom 2 beta right now ;-)  You'll have to make due with standard collections for now for production use.
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Quite right. Though he didn't ask about adjustments, it's something people often expect they can transfer. And 2 is beta, not recommended for full scale use, he'd have to follow the instructions I gave to get the data into version 1.3/4, for which there will be an upgrade conversion in due course. As a matter of interest, I've whacked 80000 images into it and haven't seen anything that worries me - yet.

John